Friday, December 18, 2009

Having perused dozens, perhaps hundreds of resumes over the years I can truthfully say that most got about 20 seconds of attention, at best. Fast Company today offered an interesting take. Offer a clear representation of your education and experience in an attractive, easy to follow and grasp infographic. Short article here.

NYT Magazine brings an eclectic look at the Year in Ideas. The attached image is the display ina bus shelter that changes by using face recognition software to make the point: domestic violence happens when no one is watching. It's a unexpected but clever use of that technology. Other ideas, like the fact that cows with names give more milk, development of weapons of moquito destruction and more are accessed by clicking on the appropriate A-Z letter at the top of the page

Thursday, December 17, 2009

New from Gale, a new iPhone app, AccessMyLibrary, uses your global position to point you to libraries within a 10-mile radius of your location. You can then select a library and obtain access to all its Gale electronic resources. Among the offerings are:

So much of the knowledge and history generated and recorded these days is "virtual" and may prove to be quite fragile over time. We are accumulating so much information so fast that it is simply impossible to catalog it all, much less assign it merit or value.

Centuries from now when our descendants are perusing our history, will they get it right? Do we really have a clear idea of what life was like 1000 years in our past, or have we been a bit too careless with "filling in the blanks?"

Tuesday, December 08, 2009

Google on Monday unveiled "Goggles" software that lets people search online using pictures taken with cameras in mobile phones based on its Android operating system.

"When you take a mobile phone camera and connect it to the Internet, it becomes an eye," Google mobile search vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra said while demonstrating Goggles in Mountain View, California.

"Google Goggles lets you take a picture of an item and use the picture as the query."

An experimental version of Goggles will be available for people at Google Labs website. Goggles already recognizes books, wine labels, CD covers, landmarks and more, according to Gundotra.Story continues below...

He demonstrated by taking a picture of a wine bottle label with a smart phone and almost instantly getting reviews, pictures and other Internet data about the vintage in a Google search results Web page.

"It is our goal to visually identify any image," Gundotra said.

"It is in Google Labs because of the nascent nature of computer vision. In the future, you will be able to point (a camera phone) and we will be able to treat it as a mouse pointer for the real world."

Google on Monday also added Japanese to a voice-based search service first rolled out about a year ago.

People can now speak Google search subjects into smart phones in English, Mandarin, or Japanese.

"In addition to voice search, Google has huge investments in translation," Gundotra said. "Our goal at Google is nothing less than being able to search in all major languages of the world."

The California Internet colossus is aiming to deliver a translation service to mobile telephones some time in 2010, according to Gundotra.

People will be able to speak into a mobile telephone to have sentences translated into other languages and delivered back quickly in text and audio forms, Gundotra said while demonstrating an early version of the service.

He also showed a "near me now" feature that uses global positioning capabilities in Android-based smart phones to customize map results to show shops, attractions, restaurants or other offerings that are in easy reach.

"In the future, there will be many different ways of searching," said Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products and user experience.

"We really foresee a world where you can search and find your answer where ever it exists and whatever language it is in."

Friday, December 04, 2009

I had invited people to a meeting in Outlook and wanted a list of those who had responded to the Outlook invitation and how they had responded. After poking at Outlook for a while, I realized it was not willing to tell me this information in a very useful way. A search sent me to Jazzerup. I followed the step-by-step instructions and was rewarded with a sortable Excel output. Slick!